Friday, February 11, 2011

Some Hints on Learning Irregular Verbs

All languages have irregular verbs. English is no different. There are no shortcuts in learning irregular verbs. They have to be memorized. But there are some things that you can do in your study to make them easier to remember.

Here are a couple of suggestions:

1. Group the irregular verbs by the following patterns:

A – A – A: These are verbs that don’t change from the base form for either the simple past form or the past participle.

Examples:

cost / cost / costhurt / hurt / hurthit / hit / hit

A – B – B: These are verbs that change from the base form for the simple past and the past participle, but there is no difference between the simple past and the past participle.

Examples:

tell / told / toldthink / thought / thoughtbuild / built / built

A – B – A: These are verbs that change from the base form for the simple past, but then the past participle is the same as the base form.

Examples:

run / ran / runcome / came / comedive / dove / dived

A – B – C:These are verbs that are different for all three: base form, simple past, and past participle.

Examples:

break / broke / brokenswim / swam / swumwrite / wrote / written

2. Another way to group verbs – by the change from the base form to the other forms, especially their vowel changes.

==> Key concept – This vowel change often (but not always) represents a change in pronunciation:

These are similar to the above, except they have no final consonant in the base form. The simple past and past participle are done as above, but note that the -y in the base form is changed to -i before adding the final -d.

lay / laid / laidpay / paid / paidsay / said / said

These also have no vowel shift – they are regular verbs. However, there is an optional –t instead of –ed for simple past, past participle (note that those ending in –ll are reduced to one “l” when using –t for past tense):